Adjacent Words

Deceptive definitions

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Webster's 1828 Dictionary

DECEP'TIVE, a. Tending to deceive; having power to mislead, or impress false opinions; as a deceptive countenance or appearance.

WordNet (r) 3.0 (2005)

adj
1: causing one to believe what is not true or fail to believe what is true; "deceptive calm"; "a delusory pleasure" [syn: deceptive, delusory]
2: designed to deceive or mislead either deliberately or inadvertently; "the deceptive calm in the eye of the storm"; "deliberately deceptive packaging"; "a misleading similarity"; "statistics can be presented in ways that are misleading"; "shoddy business practices" [syn: deceptive, misleading, shoddy]

Merriam Webster's

adjective Date: circa 1611 tending or having power to deceive ; misleading <a deceptive appearance> • deceptively adverb • deceptiveness noun

Oxford Reference Dictionary

adj. apt to deceive; easily mistaken for something else or as having a different quality. Derivatives: deceptively adv. deceptiveness n. Etymology: OF deceptif -ive or LL deceptivus (as DECEPTION)

Webster's 1913 Dictionary

Deceptive De*cep"tive, a. [Cf. F. d['e]ceptif. See Deceive.] Tending to deceive; having power to mislead, or impress with false opinions; as, a deceptive countenance or appearance. Language altogether deceptive, and hiding the deeper reality from our eyes. --Trench. Deceptive cadence (Mus.), a cadence on the subdominant, or in some foreign key, postponing the final close.

Collin's Cobuild Dictionary

If something is deceptive, it encourages you to believe something which is not true. Appearances can be deceptive. = misleading ADJ • deceptively The storyline is deceptively simple. ADV

Soule's Dictionary of English Synonyms

a. Deceitful, deceiving, delusive, illusive, illusory, misleading, fallacious, false.

Moby Thesaurus

Barmecidal, Barmecide, aberrant, abroad, adrift, airy, all abroad, all off, all wrong, amiss, apparent, apparently sound, apparitional, askew, astray, at fault, autistic, awry, beguiling, beside the mark, bogus, casuistic, catchy, chimeric, colorable, corrupt, counterfeit, deceitful, deceiving, defective, deluding, delusional, delusionary, delusive, delusory, dereistic, deviant, deviational, deviative, dishonest, disingenuous, distorted, dreamlike, dreamy, dubious, elusive, empty, errant, erring, erroneous, evasive, fake, fallacious, false, fantastic, faultful, faulty, fishy, flawed, fraudulent, hallucinatory, heretical, heterodox, hollow, illogical, illusional, illusionary, illusive, illusory, imaginary, insincere, jesuitic, misleading, not right, not true, off, off the track, ostensible, out, overrefined, oversubtle, peccant, perverse, perverted, phantasmagoric, phantasmal, phantom, philosophistic, plausible, pseudo, questionable, seeming, self-contradictory, self-deceptive, self-deluding, shifty, slippery, sophistic, sophistical, specious, spectral, spurious, straying, supposititious, trickish, tricksy, tricky, unactual, unfactual, unfounded, unorthodox, unproved, unreal, unreliable, unsubstantial, untrue, untruthful, visionary, wide, wrong